Dennis Lehane‘s Shutter Island is a creepy novel about a U.S. Marshal with a tragic past who saw dark sides of humanity that many have never seen. U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels is a former intelligence officer during WWII called to Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane to find a patient who has gone missing even though she was locked behind doors.
Chuck Aule is Teddy’s partner on this escapade, and they scour the island looking for the missing patient, who has left them a code to crack — the Law of 4. The code is simplistic and easily cracked by Teddy, who believes he’s stumbled upon island of horrors in which doctors experiment on patients much like the Nazis and Soviets did during the war.
Lehane’s narrative gets a little bogged down in inane details about the origins of names and other details that are extraneous. However, his descriptions of the island, the patients, and the water are vivid. Characters from orderlies to doctors and patients are unique and easily discernible from one another, which is a testament to Lehane’s skill as a writer. The characters could have easily been similar or stereotypical for a mental-prison hospital.
However, readers may find that they’ve heard this story before, that there are too many clues left for the reader to unravel the mystery long before the main character, Teddy Daniels. The narrator, Tom Stechschulte does an excellent job changing his voice for each character and reacting to the fast moving dialogue. Overall, Shutter Island is an entertaining mystery with a twist that may not be as surprising as expected.
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Please stop by the next stops on the National Poetry Month Blog Tour at Bermudaonion and 32 Poems Blog.
This is my 28th book for the 2010 New Authors Challenge.
This is my 7th book for the 2010 Thriller & Suspense Reading Challenge.
When I was asked by Nicole at Linus’s Blanket to join her on 
About the Poet:
Since Reb Livingston is a local D.C. area poet, this is a great look at her work as part of The Literary Road Trip, which has moved to 
About the Author:
This is my first book for the 
combines written verse with audio recitation of poetry by the poets themselves on CDs spark young readers’ love of poetry and verse. Readers between the ages of 11 and 14 will find poems in this volume that speak to their struggles with love, family, growing into adulthood, and making friends.
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by Rachelle Rogers Knight is an excellent organizing journal for passionate readers, but maybe not for book bloggers. As an avid reader with a to-read list in the hundreds, there are not enough pages in this book to house all of my reading wants and needs. An online version of this book may have been a better product, allowing readers to continuously add pages to their loaner and recommendation lists. . . but then wouldn’t we call it 
in 2007, and earned the Bronze Medal for “Independent Publisher of the Year” from Independent Publisher Online Magazine in 2008. Sourcebooks, Inc. is releasing new and improved editions of the self-published hit this April. 
mash-up. But even though it is a prequel, the struggles with the zombies occurred long before this story begins and this is just a rebirth of the plague.
is a story of Vietnamese, second-generation immigrants Linny and Van Luong and their family. Their father, a loner and inventor, holding them at arms length, and their familial history is obscured by stories and silence. The story is broken into alternating chapters about each young woman, though written in a point of view that is more like an observer with each woman’s inner thoughts are revealed — much of this complaints or observations about how different they are from one another.
